interesting, seems that they've brought the tempos down even more and made the guitar work more atmospheric. Pretty Done sounds awesome, and the title track reminds me of Love Hate Love and I Can't Remember at spots

I rank Black Gives Way to Blue as Alice in Chains best record, because I hold the hilariously unacceptable opinion that Jerry Cantrell's presence in AiC makes the band, and Layne Staley is (moreso than Vedder, even) the most easily parodied 90s rock icon. He just does some silly things. I don't really miss his voice.

Ouch. Anyway. I like AiC as a glorified Cantrell solo project. That's all I'm saying.

allmusic are more or less on point most of the time, although their ratings don't always match the content of the reviews

As far as I can tell from briefly hearing the snippets (which isn't much really), this has a lot of potential to be the worst record in their discography (which again doesn't really say much). The songs don't seem as dark and there is little variation in tempos, the drumming seems samey to me as well.

Don't want to be too negative, I haven't heard the whole songs and I'm sure they will grow on me and AiC don't really know how to make a bad album, but I don't want people to hype this too much. And this is coming from a guy who 5'd their last album.

They usually stick with a few points to give you an idea what to expect from an album. I guess they're consumer reviews so to speak and pretty good for such short lenght, but they suck if you want to have your album fully dissected and don't give you an idea of the reviewer's personality. And at times they can come out as a bit ambigous.

I mean the review doesn't give me an idea how precisely this sounds like, but I know more or less what to expect.

Just my opinon anyway, depends what kind of reviews you wanna read. I like longer reviews that are posted on here, but I rarely read the whole thing ya know.

I understand if that is their target demographic, but I hope that demographic dies off. Reviews this short for something as subjective as music, is quite frankly shallow and embarrassing. This format is fit more for toaster reviews or some other set function product we've seen a thousand times.

I also don't read reviews entirely; The beauty is that I can. Instead, I absorb enough until I feel satisfied or informed. There simply isn't enough content here to justify that feeling of fulfilment. The fact that the score is still arbitrary and convoluted in context, proves that this review needs to be longer(or at least covey reasoning more efficiently).

The samples are only 30 seconds, not 90 so it's not too revealing. Listened up until Voices but this sounds like it's gonna be fantastic. Been jamming Stone and Hollow like crazy lately, really looking forward to this.